Abstract:
The purpose of the study was to explore the perceptions of student nurses and midwives at the Cape Coast Nursing and Midwifery Training College (CCNMTC) on their clinical mentorship programme. The study employed the exploratory design and sampled 280 student nurses and midwives from CCNMTC. The study's data was gathered by a questionnaire and descriptively analysed using mean weight, standard deviation, frequency counts, and percentages. According to the findings of the study, student nurses and midwives at CCNMTC get some type of informal orientation before beginning their practical mentoring programme. As a result, providing orientation was seen as an important aspect of clinical mentoring practise since it aids in the acquisition of sufficient knowledge prior to the clinical mentorship programme. Furthermore, it was revealed that adequate mentors required for the mentorship programme while beginning the clinical mentorship programme was a difficulty and it had an impact on the student nurses and midwives' experience at CCNMTC. The study concluded that clinical mentorship is not a new phenomenon to student nurses at CCNMTC. However, the CCNMTC do not have adequate resources and systems to ensure the successful smooth running of the programme. As a result, CCNMTC administration should focus on formalising orientation sessions for their students prior to clinical practise in order to improve their experience. Again, the college management should officially engage more clinical professionals with well-motivated term of reference so they could have more mentors during the clinical practice to improve on the relationship between the mentees and commitment of their clinical mentors.
